For our lurkers: Emmett Till's dad was a rapist, executed by the US Army for murder

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Louis Till (1922 - July 2, 1945) was an American soldier and convicted rapist and murderer. He is best known as the father of Emmett Louis Till, whose murder in 1955 at the age of fourteen galvanized the African-American civil rights movement.

A soldier during World War II, Louis Till was executed by the U.S. Army in 1945 after being found guilty of murder and rape. The circumstances of his death were little known even to his family until they were revealed after the trial of his son's murderers ten years later, which affected subsequent discourse on the death of Emmett Till.

Louis Till grew up an orphan in New Madrid, Missouri.[1] As a young man, Till worked at the Argo Corn Company, was an amateur boxer, and was very popular with women. At the age of 17, he began courting Mamie Carthan, a woman of the same age. Her parents disapproved, thinking the charismatic Till was "too sophisticated" for their daughter. At her mother's insistence, Mamie broke off their courtship. But the persistent Till won out, and they married on October 14, 1940. Both were 18 years old.[2] Their only child, Emmett Louis Till, was born on July 25, 1941. Mamie left her husband soon after learning that he had been unfaithful. Louis, enraged, choked her to unconsciousness, to which she responded by throwing scalding water at him. Eventually she obtained a restraining order against him. After violating this repeatedly, a judge forced Till to choose between enlistment in the United States Army or imprisonment time. Choosing the former, he enlisted in 1943.[3]

While serving in the Italian Campaign, Till was arrested by military police, who suspected him of the murder of an Italian woman and the rape of two others in Civitavecchia. After a lengthy investigation he was court martialed, found guilty, and sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out at the United States Army Disciplinary Training Center north of Pisa on July 2, 1945.[4][5] He was a fellow prisoner of American poet Ezra Pound, who had been imprisoned for collaborating with the Nazis and Italian Fascists; he is mentioned in lines 171-173 of Canto 74 of Pound's Pisan Cantos:[6]

Till was hung yesterday
for murder and rape with trimmings

Till was buried in Grave 73, Row 7 of Plot E in Oise-Aisne American Cemetery.

Do you think any of the Trayvon crowd would believe Louis Till was guilty?

Louis Till had a military trial and was convicted/sentenced according to the evidence.

Emmet Till was hung by a crowd of white men acting outside of the law, simply because he whistled at a white woman. He was an innocent 14 year old kid. There was no arrest or trial because he committed no crime, but that didn't stop the rednecks from kidnapping him and murdering him.

His family should have been armed and shot as many members of the lynch mob as they could.

On edit: I thought Emmet Till had been lynched, but I was wrong, he was beaten to death. He still didn't deserve to die.

Emmet Till was hung by a crowd of white men acting outside of the law, simply because he whistled at a white woman. He was an innocent 14 year old kid. There was no arrest or trial because he committed no crime, but that didn't stop the rednecks from kidnapping him and murdering him.

There’s something very disturbing about the glorification of a murder victim like Emmitt Till as an example of ‘black suffering’. He didn’t die trying to register to vote or enroll in university. He died because he made sexual advances on another man’s wife. The wife was offended, told her husband and, not for the first time in human history, an enraged jealous husband defended his wife’s honor by killing Till. Would it have been different if Till was white? Maybe, maybe not

Louis Till had a military trial and was convicted/sentenced according to the evidence.

Emmet Till was hung by a crowd of white men acting outside of the law, simply because he whistled at a white woman. He was an innocent 14 year old kid. There was no arrest or trial because he committed no crime, but that didn't stop the rednecks from kidnapping him and murdering him.

His family should have been armed and shot as many members of the lynch mob as they could.

On edit: I thought Emmet Till had been lynched, but I was wrong, he was beaten to death. He still didn't deserve to die.

Your answer doesn't appear to have anything to do with my question. Perhaps you can explain that to me. I would add, to the thought expressed in my original question and in light of the feelings about Emmit Till that the black and liberal lack of interest in the truth is more than amply demonstrated by the fact that they keep showing the picture of Laura Nelson and her son hanging from a bridge and never once note that both she and her son confessed to killing a police officer.

Americans in general and blacks in particular are willfully ignorant about the truth about lynchings. They have been taught in the nearly worthless public schools that lynching was white on black, random, and without cause other than "the color of the skin". In reality, most lynchings were for cause and in retribution for a crime. 1,297 whites and 3,445 blacks were lynched between 1882 and 1964.

I always figured that if anyone I know would defend lynching, it would be Nova.

We can easily observe how "common knowledge" takes an actual event and transforms it into a cultural memory bordering on myth. The most recent and familiar one to me is "Stonewall". The glorification of the "Stonewall riot" was a deliberate act on the part of a relative few gay people to create a rallying point. As admirable as organizing for equality is, and as successful as they have been, you and I both know that Stonewall was not "the beginning of the gay rights movement" or even "the beginning of the modern gay rights movement". All it really is is a bumper sticker in the minds of the masses who haven't bothered to do their homework, who have no idea who Magnus Hirschfeld was, and who frankly have little grasp of time or history.